A tester Interview #5 – Yann Person

Following Julien, Thierry, Stéphanie and Maria, it is now up to Yann Person – who came to give a presentation on Live Functional Monitoring in Last November 2017 -, to answer our Questions&Answers in this fifth episode.

Who are you, what are you doing, where are you working?

Yann Person, 28, I’m Lead QA for Manomano: basically I make sure that what our developers build behaves as expected by our product team. Previously, I worked for fintech companies: Younited Credit and Leetchi/MANGOPAY.

How would you describe your work to a 6-year-old?

Take a car: in order for it to run you need 4 wheels, an engine, a steering wheel and so on. My job is to check that all needed elements are present, up and running.

Looking back, and if you were to start again as a tester, what advice would you give?

Be even more curious: ask people in the testing field how they work, what they do on a daily basis, go to more Meetups. The more you communicate, the more you learn.

If you were to recruit a tester, what would you look for in a candidate for this role?

I do recruit testers. What do I look for? Curiosity and eagerness to learn. If these two skills are present, it’s a very good start 🙂 By the way, if you read this and are looking for an opportunity, tweet me @troblous.

Tell us an anecdote of your life as a tester (good or bad time, incredibly hard bug to reproduce or analyse …)

Concurrency. We knew an issue occurred in situations where several payment transactions happened at the same time. It took several tries with specific tools to reproduce the issue. Once we reproduced it, we knew it was done. We didn’t know how to fix it at the time but that wasn’t something we were worried about. The only thing that mattered was that we eventually reproduced the issue.

What drives you crazy in the common misconceptions about testing?

A lot of people see testing as a center of cost and something that should just be handled after development. It simply is untrue. Testers, developers and product managers are all pieces of a bigger puzzle: without one of them, you cannot finish it!

What challenges do you face as a tester in a software product team? And how do you overcome them?

Communication is key. You’re in between Product, Support and IT teams. You need to be able to quickly adapt your element of languages and be reactive when needed. I try to listen a lot and understand where we’re gonna have pain points so that we can address them as early as possible.

One of the challenges you have faced in testing a particular feature

One example is a scoring engine we had: numerous inputs that led to an incredible number of scenario. Stuff like this isn’t manually testable, and can be difficult to automate on a high level. Although, as it was a standalone service that ran on its own, Gherkin language could be a very good idea to describe example scenario. And that’s how we added dozens of different tests that were able to properly go through the different possibilities that the engine offered.

Do you have models, people inspiring you (testers or not)?

Honestly, any entrepreneur. They face difficulties all the time, overcome them and they end up building extraordinary companies.

How do you keep learning?

I read a lot of blogs and as much as possible I discuss with peers from the industry. That’s how you can learn real life examples of tricky tests implementations for example.

Cite one or more tools that have become essential to you?

Runscope (API), GhostInspector (web), JMeter (load/perf). There are of course other tools, but these ones are the most important in my toolbox.

What revolution should the testers be prepared for?

I think the next big challenges will be related to AI and neuronal networks.
As of today, most of the software products we have are simple: when you input A, you get B. But with AI, you can’t really know what the system is going to return meaning you don’t really know how to test the output.
The next 5/10 years will be very interesting.

Thank you very much Yann. Do not hesitate to comment if you want to continue the debate on one of the subjects. We will have another guest soon.